We’ve had a great time this week seeing everyone be so enthusiastic about the Twitter Celebration Giveaway. Five excited winners took home some excellent printers and monitors from HP. We want to give a big thanks to all our readers who participated in the giveaway and who have supported us on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and even Pinterest. Also, a huge thank you to HP for being such a great company to team up with and providing all the prizes.
If you haven’t taken advantage of our latest Cult of Mac deal — The Mac Superbundle — you’d better hurry. You’ve only got a few hours left to pick up 10 great apps at a fraction of their regular price.
As you may have noticed, Cult of Mac brought in a new week with a brand spanking new redesign. Besides updating our old color scheme to be more subtly evocative of OS X Lion’s design instead of Snow Leopard’s, the guiding principle behind the new Cult of Mac design is to make it easier for our readers to know what’s new, what’s hot, what’s being talked about and what’s going on. Here’s everything you need to know about what’s new.
Cult of Mac's new business reporter, Ryan Faas, is the author of iPhone for Work, and a long-time contributor to publications like Computerworld.
For longtime Apple fans and new Mac and iOS users alike, this is a fascinating time to be living and working. Apple is becoming a fixture in every kind of workplace. It seems like every week there are stories of businesses investing in iPads or MacBooks, including the recent Forrester report that one in five people now use an Apple device on the job and 50% of companies issued Macs to at least some staff members. Not to mention the Checkpoint study that showed corporations preferring iOS over both Android and BlackBerry.
In other words, Apple, the iPad and iPhone are revolutionizing business, and Cult of Mac is joining that revolution. That’s why I take great pleasure in introducing Ryan Faas, Cult of Mac’s new business reporter. Ryan will be writing for the site full-time, covering the incredible march of Apple technology into the workplace. Ryan is a veteran tech journalist who has written extensively about Apple, business and enterprise IT, and the mobile industry. He’s contributed to Computerworld, InformIT and Peachpit Press.
This week on our Instagram feed we’ve created a new series called #ThisIsWhereiBlog to give readers a glimpse of what it’s like to write for Cult of Mac. As interesting as it is to see how Nicole Martinelli enjoys cozying up in an Eames Lounge Chair, and that John Brownlee blogs in the company of budgerigars, we’d love to see what life looks like from YOUR end. This weekend we’ll be compiling a gallery of reader-submitted photos that reveal where they blog/surf the web. Do you blog in a secret cupboard under a staircase? On the beach? We wanna see it.
To get included the gallery, take a picture of where you blog and post it on either Instagram or Twitter with the tag #ThisIsWhereiBlog. We’ll collect the best ones and display them on Cult of Mac this weekend.
Holy guacamole, we won! To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how this happened. Wired is bigger than Cult of Mac in almost every measurable aspect (except sex appeal, obviously), and their magazine is cool as hell. But somehow, we went off like Tom Brady and managed to melt their faces off with our awesomeness during our “Insta-gram Challenge.”
Even though we were slightly somewhat heavily inebriated at the Wired Party in Las Vegas when we challenged them, you guys managed to pull it off for us. First off we owe a big thank you to our readers for making this momentous feat possible. Secondly, Wired deserves some credit for playing along with us and being good sports even if they obviously aren’t the better Instagramers. Thirdly, I guess we’re obligated to thank ourselves in that prototypical KanYe West fashion. I heard whispering around the office today that CoM’s John Brownlee credits the “Kobe System” for helping him come up with hilarious tweets and pictures during CES.
What’s next? Don’t worry, our Instgram feed isn’t going dormant until the next CES. We’ll be pumping out more Cult of Mac pictures for your entertainment because we realize that taking down Wired is cool and all, but who we really want to beat is The Biebs. We’re coming after you’re next Justin!
We started an Instagram account a few days ago and have had a blast posting pics of what life at Cult of Mac looks like. Interacting with readers in this new way has been one of the funnest projects we’ve started. Wired.com had the same idea as us a few days ago but we’ve already amassed more followers than them. We threw down the gauntlet to them last night to see who can get to 3000 followers first and they’ve haughtily accepted. We need your help to kick their ass.
If you haven’t started following us on Instagram we’d love for you to open up your app right now, search for “cultofmac” and follow us.
What will you get from following us on Instagram? Here’s some samples of our awesome feed -
Still shopping around for last minute gifts for your friends or family? Consider these three books authored by Cult of Mac writers, which may be just what you’re looking for.
Earlier this week we reviewed the Fanny Wang On-Ear Headphones and concluded they’re a pretty great set of cans. One cool thing about the the Fanny Wang headphones we didn’t mention was that you can order a completely customized pair from the Fanny Wang website. Because we know you guys love a nice set of headphones, we’re giving away one free pair of Custom 2001 Fanny Wang On-Ear headphones to a lucky reader. You can customize them however you want and keep them for yourself, or give the coupon to a friend for the Holidays as a gift.
I’ve never been the best at math, but I’m pretty sure there are almost 1.5 million different color configurations possible, so to determine a winner for this giveaway we’re going to be taking submissions to see who can design the best pair of headphones.
Reading the news on the iPad is one of the absolute best experiences you can have on Apple’s magical tablet device. So when news hit yesterday that our two favorite iOS news reader apps came out with updates, we were pretty stoked. While you probably heard a great deal about the other reader app, we wanted to tell you about the awesome news reader you might be missing out on. It’s called Flud, and it was just completely redesigned yesterday.
Besides sporting a major facelift, what’s spectacular about Flud is its new ability to make reading the news a social experience. Rather than relying solely on an app to recommend websites and content to you, Flud users have the ability to see what their friends are reading in the app and share content back with them rather than spamming their Facebook or Twitter feed with the 15 news stories they’ve read throughout the day. Giving each user the ability to create a “news personality,” Flud aims to change the way we consume news much in the same way that Spotify and Rdio have changed the way we listen to music, by allowing users to inspire and be inspired by others based on what they consume.
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